Provisioning of a device, such as a cell phone handset for a carrier, often involves passing per device secret data. Hence, a secured and trusted manufacturing process is required for performing provisioning operations. Usually, the cost to guarantee security and trust is relatively low in a centralized and tightly integrated local manufacturing environment. However, as more and more hardware manufacture factories are diversely located geographically and distributed all over the globe, the cost of physically guaranteeing secured and trusted manufacturing environments has become too high to be practically plausible.
Although advancements in networking technologies have enabled secure remote transactions to support device provisioning process, the quality of networks, however, is usually not guaranteed. Often times, network connectivity may be dropped in an unpredictable and unexpected manner. This is especially true for a wide area network covering distant remote locations supported by network infrastructures of varied qualities, on top of unavoidable natural disasters and interferences. As a result, loss of network connections has become a norm instead of an exception. However, critical time to market may be lost while waiting for a recovery of network connections to complete device provisioning.
Therefore, current device provisioning process does not support insecure and untrusted remote manufacturing environments connected over intermittent networks.